Meritorious

 WORD OF THE DAY

meritorious / adjective / mair-uh-TOR-ee-us

Definition
: deserving of honor or esteem

Examples
"It's no secret that these companies have a lot on the line here. They're well resourced, and they're going to marshal every argument that they have, meritorious or meritless."
— Lina Khan, quoted in The New York Magazine, 27 Oct. 2021

He was later awarded the Bronze Star and a Silver Star for meritorious service.
— New York Times, 9 Nov. 2021

Did You Know?
People who demonstrate meritorious behavior certainly earn our respect, and you can use that fact to remember that meritorious ultimately traces to the Latin verb merēre, which means "to earn."
Nowadays, the rewards earned for meritorious acts are likely to be of an immaterial nature: gratitude, admiration, praise, etc.
But that wasn't always so. The history of meritorious recalls a reward more concrete in nature: money.
The Latin word meritorius, an ancestor of the English meritorious, literally means "bringing in money."